Friday, April 23, 2010

Sweeping The Nation Is 5: the party starts

On April 29th 2005 a very special and important event occurred, the likes of which the affected community never envisaged. Syria completed its withdrawal from the Lebanon, ending 29 years of occupation. Meanwhile - on a Friday, for some reason - Sweeping The Nation crept its way into the then stagnant UK music blog pool and proceeded to fail to shake it up, or else we'd have had more than 144 average visitors a day last week. Still, you take your celebratory moments where you can, so for the next week we'll be commemorating five years of this shit with lists, reflections, gubbins and downloads.

For the latter, we asked some of our favourite people to record special cover versions to give away gratis. They were all busy, so we grabbed some people where we could and corralled them into it instead, and they'll be going up throughout the week, or, as unsurprisingly seems to be the case as if just to carry on the grand STN tradition of commissioned group exercises, until they run out early.

In the meantime, heed that initial mission statement from all those years ago:

Actually, I'm not sure you can have a mission statement for a music blog. It's writing. About music. In a satirical style. With comment on the music news of the day, mentions of new and old songs, live and recorded reviews, audience participation, plus here a singles chart review on Sunday evenings*. There will be little beating around the bushes, but probably quite a bit of prevarication. We know our place. This isn't one of those blogs that pretends it likes Uniting Nations. However, The Paddingtons can equally bugger off. One thing this isn't is an mp3 blog.

As we say: this week, we're posting exclusive mp3s.

* This was based on the UK charts Usenet group and we thought would be a unique slanted angle on pop but turned out quite dull, both to read and write, so we quietly dropped it very quickly.